Space Tourism and the Search for God

Captain Kirk goes to space. That was the not-so-subtle subtext of the recent Amazon Prime documentary: Shatner in Space. William Shatner famously played the role of James T. Kirk - captain of the starship Enterprise – on the hit show Star Trek. Now, at 90 years of age, he would travel to space for four minutes.

Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson are the billionaires at the center of the new space race. They each have different ambitions. Elon Musk, for instance, wants to get humanity to Mars if an extinction-level event transpires that makes earth uninhabitable. Jeff Bezos, on the other hand, wants to return the earth to a pristine environment by outsourcing all our heavy industry to outer space. Both visions are driven by a dream to offer salvation to humanity.

Along the way, these tech titans are creating a healthy dose of PR for themselves by taking rich tourists into space. For a hefty fee, you too can experience four minutes of sub-orbital flight! One day, it is hoped, the average human will be able to experience the exhilarating effects of outer space.

What are Christians to make of this burgeoning space industry? Are orbital hotels really in our future? Will the future me be able to book a weekend trip to explore the harsh lunar landscape? We cannot say with certainty what the future of outer space will involve. But we can make some assertions about the current space tourism industry.

When I watched Shatner in Space I was struck by the actor’s description of his experience. Shatner is culturally Jewish, but has claimed he’s animistic, choosing to identify as “spiritual, but not religious.” He believes there’s an energy animating all things that connects us to one another, and specifically rejects the idea that a personal, divine being exists.

“For millennia, humans looked at the created order (including the stars) and something welled up within them. They recognized, like the Psalmist, that there must be something, or someone, out there, organizing the universe.”

In that context, Shatner’s reaction to sub-orbital flight was singular. He was in awe. After touching down on planet earth, he was nearly in tears as he described the experience of seeing the earth from space. “What you have given me is the most profound experience, I hope I never recover from this. I hope that I can maintain what I feel now. I don’t want to lose it.”

His reaction was similar to that of some astronauts who, upon viewing the earth from space, had what was described as The Overview Effect. The Overview Effect is a religious interpretation of human spaceflight that coheres well with pantheistic philosophies. It is the experience of cosmic oneness that some feel when they gaze at “the little blue dot” we call home.

And yet, as a Christian, I couldn’t help but relate to Shatner’s experience through the lens of the Christian story. The Bible teaches that the heavens declare the glory of God (Psalm 19:1), and David poetically mused: “When I observe your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you set in place, what is a human being that you remember him, a son of man that you look after him?” (Psalm 8:3-4). When David looked at creation, he became aware of how small he was, and of how great God was.

This is rooted in the theological concept of transcendence. John Oswalt notes that God “is everywhere present in the world, but He is not the world and the world is not Him …. It is a creation that, by his permission, has a distinct existence from his own. This is the law of transcendence, and it means that God is wholly other than the cosmos.”

For millennia, humans looked at the created order (including the stars) and something welled up within them. They recognized, like the Psalmist, that there must be something, or someone, out there, organizing the universe.

“This is a reminder that humans are incurably religious, because at our core, we were made to be worshippers”

Now, in the secular age, humanity is trapped in what the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has called the “Immanent Frame.” As a result, we believe, by default, that the material world is all that exists. Imprisoned within this logic, we are incapable of discerning anything else. Taylor argues, “So we come to understand our lives as taking place within a self-sufficient immanent order …. We have come of age …. The immanent order can thus slough off the transcendent.”

It is as if we are living under a spell. We look at the cosmos, imprinted with beauty from its Creator, and all we see is atoms. And yet, the pull of the transcendent is hard to shake. This is apparent in the history of spaceflight. A Dutch ambassador once described the Soviet Union’s pseudo-religious aspirations in space: “It is significant that a regime which preaches atheism above all else, cannot do without heaven in a way.” Hard as we try, humans can’t do without heaven. For spiritualists like Shatner, this can lead to quasi-religious experiences in orbit. Yet by itself, space tourism does not offer humanity the salvation we instinctively crave. As C. S. Lewis taught us, we must introduce “stronger spells” to awaken us from the curse of modernity.

Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are providing rich people with an opportunity to taste transcendence. They are offering them a ticket to the stars, to “touch the face of God.”  This is a reminder that humans are incurably religious, because at our core, we were made to be worshippers. In the secular age, our mission must embrace apologetics as a central task. We must work to awaken wonder and awe in the hearts of our neighbors. We can’t all go to space to encounter God. But we don’t need to. He is not far from each of us (Acts 17:27).